Know literature, know the world

If you want to understand the lives of textile workers in Bangladesh, read Monica Ali. Photograph: Jewel Samad/AFP

Anybody who worries that they're not learning anything useful from novels can stop the hand-wringing and keep reading: a new report provides a possible salve for the guilty reader's social conscience. A team from Manchester University and the London School of Economics claim that stories and their writers can do just as much as academics and policy researchers, perhaps even more, to explain and communicate the world's problems. Fiction, they boldly venture, can be just as useful as fact.

The report is named The Fiction of Development: Literary Representation as a Source of Authoritative Knowledge, a title which, whether intentionally or not, is pleasingly ambiguous. That word "fiction" looks alarmingly pessimistic for an instant, as if indicating that development is itself a myth or fiction. Instead of course, it is referring to novels and poems whose subject matter includes poverty, migration and so on. These are real-world issues, of course, but the authors insist that our understanding of them grows out of a series of "stories".

As any primary school teacher will tell you, we understand best through narrative. So official reports themselves have their fictional elements; their case studies, hypothetical examples and even the rhetoric with which they are presented all make the boundary between fact and fiction a little hazy.

Yet even if we understand things as narratives, most of us would rather read the traditional story presented by a novel than we would the rather dryer story of a policy report. Best-selling novels such as Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner thus reach a huge audience (especially when helped along by the other great narrative art and made into a blockbuster film) whilst academic research, no matter how insightful, will never be read by millions. Which is why the report's authors venture that Hosseini's novel has probably "done more to educate western readers about the realities of daily life in Afghanistan than any government media campaign, advocacy organisation report, or social science research."

The novels lauded in the report appeal to emotion but crucially, present situations of poverty, migration and so on, in powerfully realistic and hence memorable ways. Monica Ali's Brick Lane is particularly praised for being a novel underpinned by academic research: Ali's first acknowledgement at the end of the book is to the University of Sussex Institute of Development Studies academic Naila Kabeer, "from whose study of Bangladeshi women garment workers in London and Dhaka (The Power to Choose) I drew inspiration."

Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance is also mentioned in the report, and celebrated for being a fixture on university reading lists for subjects such as rural-urban migration and urbanisation. The list of novels whose literary power is bound up with their power to push social change is potentially huge. Dickens, of course, is an obvious contender, as is Harper Lee with To Kill A Mockingbird, but from more recent years I'd add Rose Tremain's novel, the Orange Prize-winning, The Road Home.

Surely her protagonist Lev has done more to elucidate the plight of migrant workers than any worthy but dull research findings. Rational beings that we are, we will nonetheless always be more affected by emotion than we are by logic. As the report's authors remind us, "having a "good story" is essential if one wants to make a difference in the world".

Unsurprisingly George Eliot, puts it better:

"Appeals founded on generalisations and statistics require a sympathy ready-made, a moral sentiment already in activity; but a picture of human life such as a great artist can give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment."